This Houston Transplant Apologizes for No Child Left Behind

Sorry Delaware, for all the mess created for public schools by fellow Houstonians which has the local blogsphere on fire over so called school reform and charter schools and the like.

Little did I know that my early public school activism would contribute to the birth of the likes of Margaret Spelling, Rod Paige and Kipp Academy, all with their origins in Houston, Texas.

As a part of a successful movement to integrate the huge Houston Independent School District, we thought we were doing the right thing in building a political movement in the late 60’s/early 70’s to upend segregation in our public schools.  It was called Citizens for Good Schools.  A thousand Anglo, African American and Hispanic parents came together and unseated a conservative school board resistant to integration.

Our reign lasted two terms before a conservative majority overtook us.  But our ideas for magnet schools, gifted and talented programs, creation of the Houston Community College System and a myriad of other public school reforms designed to stem white flight had their own positive momentum and is largely in place today.  The suburban school districts populated by our departing Anglos today emulate many of these programs, though significantly whiter in population.

I’m sorry to report that we failed to stem white flight.  The conservative campaign of fear and hate overpowered our good intentions to have a public education system benefiting all ethnic and economic groups that our kids could flourish in and build a new kind of unified society.

And we gave birth to the authors of No Child Left Behind with Margaret Spelling, a graduate of one of our integrated Houston high schools.  Margaret studied political science at University of Houston and went on to serve Republican governors in education “reform”, ran the Texas Association of School Boards and later was the political director of the Bush campaigns for Governor and President.    I so well remember a very uncomfortable evening with her father at a wedding dinner, enduring hours of his racist rants about welfare and black people.  She was apparently tutored well.  As you know, she went on to succeed Rod Paige as Bush’s Secretary of Education.

Paige, a former coach, was one of her Houston mentors in education “reform”, serving as a Houston School District trustee from 1989 to 1994, later making a most unusual move to Superintendent in 1994.  You may recall his “Houston Miracle”, a program touting his elevation of HISD test scores, later to be discredited with revelations of  a systemic program of cheating by teachers and administrators.  Rod was a rare African American Republican operative. He became Bush’s first Secretary of Education and brought Spelling along with him to D.C.  Together they birthed No Child Left Behind.

Finally, Houston also became an early adopter of Charter Schools through Mike Fineberg, a Teach For America transplant as a co-creator of the first Kipp Academy in Houston   He was strongly supported by Paige and Spelling.  You know the rest of the Kipp story, with 125 operations scattered over the U.S.A.  Kipp was among the earliest Charter schools in the nation, started in 1994.

Lurking in the background there was the School of Education at the University of Houston that spawned many “reform”  ideas and produced several Houston School Board members over the years.  One of their strategies was the decentralization of the very large Houston School District which had been governed by a totally at- large school board.  They helped sell and create single member districts on the nice sounding theory that it would bring governance closer to their neighborhoods of sprawling Houston.  It diffused any future opportunity of a system wide takeover of the Board as we had pulled off twice with our liberal overthrow of  segregation.

The result there were many  single district fiefdoms comprising the massive HISD, with lots of graft and nepotism.  This makes system wide reform nearly impossible.  Much like Delaware’s proliferation of little school districts.

So, this ex-Houstonian extends an apology to Delaware for his previous home town’s role in Education Deform.